Competitive Scrabble players spend a mean of 4.5 hr a week memorizing words from the official Scrabble dictionary. When asked if they learn word meanings when studying word lists, only 6.4% replied "always," with the rest split between "sometimes" and "rarely or never." Number of years of play correlated positively with expertise ratings,…

Verbal fluency is a widely used neuropsychological paradigm. In fMRI implementations, conventional unpaced (self-paced) versions are suboptimal due to uncontrolled timing of responses, and overt responses carry the risk of motion artifact. We investigated the behavioral and neurofunctional effects of response pacing and overt speech in semantic…

Bilingual children often outperform monolingual children in tasks of cognitive control. This advantage may be a consequence of the fact that bilinguals have more practice controlling attention due to an ongoing need to manage two languages. However, existing evidence is limited because possible differences in ethnicity and socioeconomic status…

In this study we examined prepotent motor inhibition and responsiveness to reward using a variation of the stop signal reaction time (SSRT) task in clinic- and community-recruited children ages 7 to 12 with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder-inattentive type (ADHD-I), ADHD-combined type (ADHD-C), and non-ADHD controls. Contrary to…

This paper has been concerned with the recognition of items in relatively short memorized lists, investigated with RT methods. (Author)

The stimulus-familiarization-effect (SFE) paradigm, a reaction-time (RT) task based on a response to novelty procedure, was modified to assess response for novelty, ie., a response-reinforcement sequence. The potential implications of attention for reinforcement theory and learning in general are discussed. (Author/CS)

This study was designed to investigate the effect of a placebo (sugar pill) accompanied by suggestions that the pill would either (1) improve performance as a stimulant or (2) cause a deterioration in performance as a depressant when the performance in question was the subjects' complex reaction time to a light stimulus. The Harvard Group Scale of…

Two hundred and fifty-six children between the ages of five and eight years were tested for reaction time and movement time on an electrical device which was constructed by the author. Since the primary purpose of this project was to gather base-line data on the reaction times and movement times of these particular children, no specific…

Preschool, third grade and fifth grade children were presented with two choice-reaction time experiments in which probe stimulus quality was manipulated, to measure the effects of probe stimulus degradation at three developmental levels. Results support the hypothesis that children and adults employ similar strategies in preprocessing degraded…

The study investigated the effects of sentence structure on the number of error sentences and response latency in a sentence-repetition task with 40 female college students. Ss repeated short- and long-test sentences containing either a single self-embedded or right-branching subject-focus on object-focus relative clause. (Author)

Examines the possible changes in Matching Familiar Figures (MFF) response times and errors associated with age. The subjects were 23 boys and girls aged 5-13. (MP)

A sample of 48 preschoolers were asked to ride a tricycle appropriately following commands presented at 3-second intervals. Half of the children were also asked to repeat the commands aloud. Results are presented for frequency of inappropriate motor activity and reaction times. (Author/JMB)

A sample of 90 children in kindergarten, second, and fourth grades were presented with ambiguous referential communication messages and asked to judge the quality of the messages. (Author/JMB)

This paper questions the assumption that a central processing deficit exists in the speed of performing mental operations by children as compared to adults. Two hypotheses are proposed and data are cited as evidence. (JMB)